Lucía had asked for the transfer. She had wanted to move to Bogotá. She had planned it. And yet, four months later, she felt more alone than she ever had.
Where she started
She had work, an apartment, a routine. What she didn’t have was anyone to call on a Tuesday without a specific reason. Her friends from Medellín were still there, but the group chat had become something different when she was living in a different emotional time zone. Conversations became updates: good, busy, yes let’s get together at some point.
The isolation wasn’t dramatic. It was gray. She came home, heated something up, turned on a show. Fell asleep and repeated. Weekends were the hardest — the contrast between the noise of the city outside and the silence of the apartment inside.
The first days
On day 1, Lucía completed the relationship map: who was in her life, how often there was real contact, what quality that contact had. The result was thinner than she had expected to see written down.
The behavioral activation modules on days 2 and 3 didn’t ask her to make new friends — they asked her to gradually increase contact with her environment. Lucía chose a café near work where she could go to work for an hour each week, instead of the apartment. Not to talk to anyone. Just to be in a space with people.
The turning point
Day 6 brought relational gratitude: writing about three people she had real connections with, even if those connections were weak or distant. Lucía wrote about her university friend, her cousin, a colleague at the new job. They weren’t strong ties yet — but they existed. The module invited her to reach out to one of them without waiting for an important reason. Lucía sent her friend a voice note. Just to see how she was doing. Her friend replied within twenty minutes.
That week she attended the company’s welcome event for new employees. She had declined the first one. She went to the second.
Where she is now
By day 14, Lucía didn’t have a friend group in Bogotá. That doesn’t change in two weeks. But she had three contacts who were no longer just colleagues — people she had shared at least one real conversation with. She had a café that already felt like hers. She had a habit of reaching out to someone in Medellín every three days.
The loneliness was still there. But it was no longer an opaque block.
Techniques that helped
- Behavioral activation: gradually increasing contact with the physical and social environment
- Gradual reconnection: reactivating existing ties before trying to build new ones
- Relational gratitude: identifying real connections that isolation tends to make invisible